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Friday, April 23, 2010

Can You Taste What I Am Saying?

Remember when I suggested that there were two types of people? I will now prove it. One type of person will understand what I am talking about and the second type will think the rest of us are crazy.

Have you heard of Synesthesia? Dictionary.com states that it is "A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color." So basically it is when your senses get mixed up a little bit. The most common is when you can see sound as a color, but there are all types of different combinations. It is fairly common, too, some suggest up to 1 in 23 people have some variant of it.

This is something I never knew was weird. I thought everyone knew the genders of numbers. I then spoke to my family about it and they too agreed. Come to find out, it is genetic. So, when my family agreed that it was normal, it was because we are all abnormal.

My mom sees time visually. If you ask her about June, 1987, she sees this giant map and she locates the date on it.

Does any of this ring a bell for you? Do you think I'm crazy?

I was listening to the How Stuff Works podcast and they were talking about the neurological basis of this condition. It was terribly interesting. They have done studies that prove that for people who see sound as color, the part of their brain that processes both sound and color are active at the same time. Somewhere there are some crossed wires. Most people function just fine with it. Some people get really famous. There are a fair amount of musicians (John Mayer, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel) that see sound as color. It helps them memorize songs easier and it is also easier to tell when something is off (the color will be wrong.)

This is a simple test I found here. Basically you look at the first picture and are asked to pick out the twos. For most people it takes a minute (me too, for the record) but for some synesthetes it is super easy because it actually looks more like the second picture. What about you? Easy or no?

Random blurb that almost/not really seems related: I see things/tasks/etc in bar graph form. Say I've started a few different projects that I'd like finished at the same time. If their 'bars' in my head aren't quite equal I get upset. Aaaaand as I'm typing this I'm realizing that it's making no sense. But, yeah. It's actually quite a big deal in the land o'my brain.

The 2's jumped out at me! It's actually easier for me to find them in the left picture because the right picture just makes me focus on the actual color instead of the task at hand.

I don't understand the whole numbers/genders thing. But I saw the 2s right away. I "feel" colors...green is cool and moist, red is hot, orange and yellow are warm, blue is chilly...black is wet and ice cold. White is so ice cold you feel burnt. I know, strange.